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Konami Veterans Talk NES Classics
Thanks to Video-Fenky for posting an interview with Konami NES veterans, Kazuhisa Hashimoto and Shigeharu Umezaki, as they "...discuss what was involved in creating your typical 8-bit console game in the mid-1980s." Highlights include discussion of the infamous Konami cheat code - Hashimoto says "There's [no special story behind it], really. I mean, I was the one using it (laughs), so I just put in something I could remember easily", and the much-reduced development teams of the '80s - "With Hyper Olympic, my first game, there was a programmer and a designer - two people - and it took half a year. Gradius was four people and I don't think it even took that long."
Heeeey Macarena
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
You have made an incredibly discovery there. It is quite perplexing how an event that happend last month was covered on CNN two years ago. Does this mean CNN can see into the future? The world may never know. @$$|-|@7
Trust Your Technolust
Anyone remember how frustrating it was trying to hit up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-start before the Contra titlescreen came all the way up?
I'm hoping the next big thing in game development will be cell phones. There are all these people out there with gaming devices that they carry on themselves at all times. Some of the phones ship with Java now which isn't bad for making simple games
The point of this as it relates to the article is, maybe the one to six man development team isn't dead. Maybe it is just getting started.
That was a great hockey game for the NES from Konami. You even heard someone say "Blades of Steel" when you loaded the game. Whhhooaaaa! :) It was so cool at the time! It wasn't too realistic (since when the loser of a fight is going to the penalty box? :D ), but it just so fun.
No rules, just twelves guys with a hockey stick and one puck, trying to outscore the other team. Today's game are all about realism. I hate it when you have to stop the game because off an offside or whatever hey call them these days. That's why I don't really watch hockey anymore either. The game just stops too often. But Blades of Steel stopped only for goals. The only rule was there was no rule.
A weird gameplay mechanic of the game was that if you touched the goaler, a player would fall, so if you stuck your guy with the puck behind the goaler right in the middle of the net, the CPU players at the professionnal difficulty level would try to go around the net, but always bump into the goaler, start again, fall on the ice, and again and again and again, so you just had to score once and then wait for the timer to go back to 0:00 and you won the game.
I've played many hockey games dring the 90s (well, not that many tough, many were revisions of NHL Hockey from EA), but I never enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed Blades of Steel back then. Sure the AI wasn't as developped as today's hockey games, but I can't remember a hockey that when we made a goal had me and my buddies screaming more than this one.
I've always wondered why Life Force was never as recognized as Gradius. To this day, Life Force is one of my favorite games for any system. THat last stage, after you beat the boss.... It takes nerves of steel to get past the "Spontaneous Bars of doom."
Either way, a fun game indeed.
What, me Tweet?
Co-incidentally, just today I was commenting to my wife about games from the 80's - when I was a school boy - today.
I was just investigating some old computer magazines for the most popular gaming platforms back then.
These mags make good reading. The reviews praise games which took only a few weeks or months for a one/two person development team to write.
Games then had what I call "playability" - more substance than style. Graphics capabilities were not good, memory was very tight (32K on some machines) and typical processors were clocked at less than 1Mhz.
In these days of fast processors, graphics GPUs, realms of memory etc, it seems (IMHO) that all that games are all about style with little substance.